About Morris Halle
Morris Halle ( HAL-ee; né Pinkowitz; July 23, 1923 – April 2, 2018) was a Latvian-born American linguist who was an Institute Professor, and later professor emeritus, of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The father of "modern phonology", he was best known for his pioneering work in generative phonology, having written "On Accent and Juncture in English" in 1956 with Noam Chomsky and Fred Lukoff and The Sound Pattern of English in 1968 with Chomsky. He also co-authored (with Samuel Jay Keyser) the earliest theory of generative metrics, and developed the Distributed Morphology framework with Alec Marantz. == Life and career == Halle was born on July 23, 1923, in Liepāja, Latvia, as Morris Pinkowitz (Latvian: Moriss Pinkovics). In 1929 he moved with his Jewish family to Riga. He arrived in the United States in 1940 and graduated from George Washington High School. From 1941 to 1943, he studied engineering at the City College of New York. He entered the United States Army in 1943 and was discharged in 1946, at which point he went to the University of Chicago, where he got his master's degree in linguistics in 1948. He then studied at Columbia University under Roman Jakobson, became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951, and earned his PhD from Harvard University in 1955. He is considered to be, with Noam Chomsky, the founder of the modern linguistics department at MIT. He retired from MIT in 1996, but he remained active in research and publication.
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